Ma.gnolia Bookmarks Offline: Severe Data Loss

Ma.gnolia is a popular social bookmarking tool and its now offline. The site owners say that Ma.gnolia has suffered severe data corruption and data loss and data recovery seems difficult in the next few days.

The website shows only this messsage now that as of Friday, January 30th, Ma.gnolia experienced extensive data corruption and loss, which led to Ma.gnolia members bookmarks going offline and there is no proper assurance when the service will be restored.

Though they are trying to keep the Ma.gnolia community updated on Twitter, it will not go well with users who heavily depend on it for their bookmark storage and community activities.

More and more web users are now filing their favorite sites and links in free online bookmarking services like Delicious, which lets user access their bookmarks from anywhere in the world while sharing them with friends. But we hope they will stay safe online forever…

Its surprising how frequently such popular websites are suffer data losses – remember how JournalSpace lost thousands of blogs due to a disgruntled employee and Sitemeter lost statistics data due to power outage. These events highlight that we should back up our online data, in whichever form it is, wherever it is – better be safe than sorry. It could happen to any service, anytime.